I dropped Diana at the airport on Friday morning for her trip to San Francisco for her High School reunion. At the time of her graduation San Domenico was an all-girls school and so husbands are not invited to the reunion luncheons. The school is located in San Anselmo, Marin county and looks beautiful from the pictures that I’ve seen.
Alicia agreed to accompany me to the Lettuce concert at the Granada on Friday night in McD’s absence and invited a friend to join us. We enjoyed dinner on the patio at the Sundown restaurant next to the theater and I learned more than I ever wanted to know about ways that high school girls go about getting the right boys to invite them to the dance.
All three of us really enjoyed the concert. It was obvious that Alicia was particularly enjoying the music from my seat upstairs – Alicia and her friend wanted to be downstairs in the standing room section in the middle of all the excitement. Alicia had been listening to the band for several days in preparation for the concert and listed off her top 5 favourite songs – she knew more about the band than I did going into the show – I had heard them on the radio and really liked the song so I took a chance on the show.
Lettuce is a funk band that was formed in Boston when its members were attending a program at the Berklee College of Music as teenagers. They would visit local jazz clubs and ask, “Would you let us play?”, let us becoming lettuce. I really like the mix of an excellent brass section, funky bass, and great guitar. They clearly have a very loyal following – I’ve been to many shows at the Granada and this had by far the loudest crowd.
We got home from the show a little before 1am and as I checked my phone I found that there was a work issue that needed attention. Around 3:30am I thought it was under control and went to sleep, only to find when I awoke around 6am that it was still a big issue. We ultimately had everything fixed around 10pm on Saturday night. Ugh!
Double Ugh when I heard from Diana on Saturday morning that the maneuver she had performed with her foot while walking back on the gravel at Adamo’s home with her nephew Luciano from watching the sunset was causing her enormous pain now. Apparently the most pain she’s felt since childbirth. All family members had important plans on Saturday morning and my boys were busy with Will’s knee surgery (more on that in a minute) so poor Diana had to call an Uber to get to the clinic to have her foot looked at. To add insult to injury (clever, no?), the clinic didn’t have an x-ray technician on Saturday and so had to send her to a sister clinic for that. She finished up with a diagnosis of no obvious 
fractures, a stiff boot and a pair of crutches. Adamo came to the rescue and picked McD up from the clinic and drove the 90 minutes to catch the tail end of the reunion luncheon. Diana had let the girls know that she might not make the lunch due to her injury and so received a big round of applause when she approached the group just in time to have a nice visit before everyone disbanded. The good news is that the foot seems to be healing rapidly now and we hope she’ll be back to normal sometime next week. I found it exceptionally frustrating to be so far away and to have no control over the situation while my wife was in so much pain.
While these two situations were developing, Will was getting surgery to repair and reattach the meniscus in his knee. He injured it again last weekend playing “ultimate Frisbee” and wasn’t able to be scheduled for surgery until Saturday morning. A few years ago he had a nasty skateboard accident at Cal Poly and had a similar surgery to recover. It seems the surgery went well – Will was in a lot of pain and looking for a pastrami sandwich because he hadn’t eaten all day.
I had planned on attending a tribute concert for Leonard Cohen at Dan’s Silverleaf in Denton on Saturday night but was way too tired to consider it.
I gave Alicia the choice of several places for Sunday brunch and she selected Sugar Bacon in downtown McKinney. She asked if she could drive Penelope down there and I had a moment of weakness. P found Alicia to be an excellent driver – even when we encountered the Oktoberfest traffic and parking challenges in downtown that I’d forgotten about. Alicia had the pulled pork Benedict which I think gets close to my becoming famous version. On the drive home, after punching the accelerator, Alicia remarked, “I’ve got to get me one of these”.
I picked Diana up at the airport on Sunday night and had the pleasant surprise of finding her accompanied by Patty and Brent (while she hobbled around on her crutches)– they had been on a trip to Paso Robles and Carmel and Diana ran into them on the airport concourse. It took forever for D’s checked back to come out on to the carousel (close to an hour) because a car seat had caused a jam up somewhere in the system.
Diana had “won” an iPad mini at a band silent auction and gave it to her Mom during the visit. We’ve been enjoying her experiments with Facetime and she seems to be really enjoying the visual communication. I did make the mistake last night of asking her what she thought of the NFL teams kneeling during the playing of the national anthem – she did have an opinion on that one for sure.
We watched a documentary/comedy performance movie this week called “Becoming Seinfeld” that shows Jerry Seinfeld talking about how he got into comedy and also performing a comedy set at the club where he first started in New York. I really enjoyed the history and his comedy. The final credits were accompanied by the song “Grazing in the Grass” by Hugh Masekela. I hadn’t heard him or the song before and it really caught my attention. I read that he is best known for his flugelhorn work and left South Africa in 1961 with the help of a few New York based musicians like Dizzie Gillespie and Harry Belafonte. Grazing in the Grass was released in 1968 and topped the charts, selling more than 4 million copies – seems it caught the attention of a lot of people when first released as well.
Another song I heard this week that I enjoyed very much was Leon Russell’s version of “Georgia on my mind” from his 2014 album “Life Journey”. The big band arrangement that joins after the quiet solo vocal and piano first verse is excellent and totally unexpected. One of my regrets is not going to the Elton John and Leon Russell show in Dallas when Diana suggested it. Leon passed away a few months later and I would have enjoyed hearing him live.